The Best Artists

“Oh, you should have seen Benlliure´s workshop,” Don José told us, still amazed as he had been as a boy in Malaga 60 years before. “When my father worked with him there were more than a dozen assistants busy and they were all better craftsmen than any you’d find now.”

Mariano Benlliure (pronounced BEN YOUR-EH) was one of the greatest Spanish sculptors. (See The General and His Horse)

“The man was such a genius,” Don José went on . “He could model anything in creation with absolute accuracy, from memory. He just seemed to know how everything was made and how it worked. You and I have to study something in order to model it but he just knew it. He could model everything by heart. If you told him to model a giraffe, say, or a zebra, he would take the handful of clay and begin to think with his fingers—‘how was it?’ they would ask, but never stop working. It is as if he were God and creating the first zebra. He assembled the bones and muscle machine and made it work.

“How did he know that? When did he look so closely at that animal? I don´t know about you, but when I look I don´t yet SEE. I must first create a problem for myself and then go to the animal to find out the solution. Seeing isn´t enough; even looking isn´t sure. I have to investigate, hypothesize like a scientist and then go and test. Maybe Don Mariano did that as a boy—he must have done it all his life. But when I knew him, he already knew everything, knew every animal, every bone of every animal, how every animal differed from the rest, and how they were the same.

“In a way he knew too much. It was too easy for him to put unnecessary facts and facile realism into his figures, and often he gave into that temptation and spoiled his works. The bronze flowers and birds and weapons and frills he stuck onto his great figures and all around them and beside them ruined them for the critics and disqualified him as one of the greatest artists of all times. Such a shame!
“But I´ll tell you this: as a modeller he didn´t have a rival anywhere in any age—he couldn´t have had.”

This was the memory of one sculptor for his master. Everyone listened with great attention and respect. We all would have given a lot to see the great Benlliure in his workshop—modelling that horse for the Martinez Campos statue or one of his famous fighting bulls.
And Don José himself, who knew so much about sculpture, what about him and his work?

There was a liveliness, a straightforwardness, an honesty about Don José that made everyone like him and listen to him. It was as if he were still a young man telling you excitedly about all he was learning. He’d done every kind of sculpture, large and small, and his knowledge of the professional’s world was immense, going back to almost the nineteenth century. And yet……

I sadly had to admit to myself that his statues left me cold. They were plain, robust, figures without life—accurately modelled, true, but as lifeless as…..statues. The saint knelt and prayed; the soldier stood his guard; the dog lay sphinx-like on the ground with a stony stare. There was no charm to them, no grace, no surprise. Your “eye” learned nothing and what is more, was not invited to look for anything. The simpatico, enthusiastic Don José was unable to show his love for sculpture in his sculpture. Nowhere did you see signs of the fun he had while creating; nowhere was there any wit, any wide-eyed wonder, any favorite part. Evidently mere anatomical “correctness” was not enough to bring about lifelikeness—that divine grace of Benlliure.

(Click twice on thumbnail to enlarge)
General Martinez Campos (and his horse) by Mariano Benlliure
in the Retiro Park, Madrid.

The big equestrian statue of General Martinez Campos stands high on a rock in a little glade.
It isn’t the General who is the real protagonist of the monument, but his horse. It brings him to the top of the rock in one last breath, squirming with exhaustion after the climb. They have been riding hard and long. The sturdy, brave general, however, sits upright and serene in his saddle, no doubt thirsty and hungry and exhausted too. It is probably a good portrait, though it is his clothes, his coat with the sleeves hanging, his boots and his breeches, that make you look again and again.
No one modelled better than Mariano Benlliure—everywhere he tells you to look at details and delight with him in them.

How is this equestrian statue different from other ones in parks everywhere? The exhausted horse. The way the horse stands on that rock with its back legs still climbing. And the novelty of the pose, of the idea of contrasting horse and rider.

Benlliure often spoiled his work by overloading it. He piled decoration on decoration, detail on detail. The big ugly monument to Alfonso XII on the banks of the Retiro lake is his too. He couldn’t leave alone the rock the General stood on  and carved a battle scene on it which the weather has now in part erased. He also glued big bronze weapons and drums and banners to it. Those weapons, like the general’s clothes, are so realistic that they become interesting for their historical accuracy. The artist thought these things aided the “story” of the statue. Did they make it better or worse art?

You can read about General Martinez Campos in Churchill’s autobiography My Early Life. The young Winston went to Cuba as a reporter during the Spanish American War and rode with him on campaign. He says the General stood tall in his saddle while the bullets flew around them and made Churchill want to get behind a tree.